Databarracks uses SolidFire Storage to Guarantee Quality of Service

We are pleased to announce that Databarracks' Infrastructure-as-a-Service now uses SolidFire SSD storage for high performance and guaranteed Quality of Service.

SolidFire, based in Colorado is an exciting start-up with an innovative take on storage. In particular, SolidFire addresses the performance issues that are key for providing reliable service in the cloud.

We are the first UK based service provider to use SolidFire storage and in this blog post we want to explain the reasons why we are using it and the benefits it brings.

SSD storage offers higher performance than spinning disk.  While performance for sequential I/O can be fast on spinning disk, it is significantly slower for random I/O due to disk head movement.  With SSD, random and sequential reads are equally fast.  While write speed for SSD is slower, SolidFire is designed to minimise the number of writes to maintain high performance.

The most important benefit of SolidFire storage is that it decouples performance from capacity.  Using traditional storage, your performance is tied to the capacity of the disk.  To get higher performance you would need to throw disk at a problem.  The result is a waste of storage.  With SolidFire we are able to provide SLAs around IOPS and performance which are completely separate to storage capacity.

In a multi-tenant environment, this is particularly important.   The performance is dedicated to you, regardless of what else is going on in the shared environment.

SolidFire also helps maintain security at the storage level by including CHAP verification, specific to each tenant.

What this means for you is that even your most I/O intensive and critical applications will perform fantastically in our secure, resilient IaaS environment.